Joe Soucheray: This Catholic town is weary of sordidness. Throw the bums out.

It evidently has been established as fact, or at least reported as fact, that a computer owned by a priest named Jonathan Shelley, 52, had stored on it thousands of images of pornography.

That discovery was made in 2004 when a fellow who formerly owned the house that was being used by Shelley as a rectory wanted to give the computer to his grandchildren at the conclusion of the house's use as a rectory.

Joe Ternus, whose father owned the house in Hugo, checked the computer. He found the images. He contacted church officials, who sent out a private investigator, who took the hard drive.

That was nine years ago?

A woman named Jennifer Haselberger, who was chancellor for canonical affairs for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, acted as a whistleblower and tried to alert the public to priestly misconduct by releasing information to Minnesota Public Radio. She has since resigned and on her way out, she apparently notified the Ramsey County attorney's office that they might to want to take a look at Shelley's computer.

OK. That got the St. Paul police involved. But when they examined the discs from Shelley's computer, they found nothing on them save for adult pornography, which is unseemly, but not a crime.

Allegations that the computer had stored images of child pornography have been denied, and everybody is now lawyered up.

Novelists and filmmakers have made great fortunes with this sort of ugliness and duplicity.

Advertisement

A private investigator? Really? An official resigning "in great sadness.'' Computer discs kept in, what, a wall safe behind a painting of the Last Supper?

For an entity that is not even supposed to be a business, the Catholic Church is a big business in this town. The cathedral, alone, is a featured landmark of St. Paul, the way a golf course features its signature hole on a scorecard. The hand of the church is everywhere, parish by parish, neighborhood by neighborhood. St. Paul is a Catholic town, and Catholics are tired of this, embarrassed by the church having to put its hand down on one problem only to have another problem pop up the next week or month.

The archdiocese does not appear to have its act together at all. To that end, Archbishop John Nienstedt has called for a "special'' task force of laypeople to be formed by Reginald Whitt, a Dominican priest who was one of the founding members of the University of St. Thomas Law School. Its findings will be made public.

We don't know how large the task force is, or who they are, or what makes them "special,'' other than it is special, or extraordinary, to have to even convene the thing in the first place.

I am not suggesting that Nienstedt is not sincere. Nobody in his right mind would condone sexual impropriety by his employees.

Most urgent are those allegations of impropriety contained in any accusations of computer discs harboring child pornography. That elephant needs to be dragged out of the room without a single shred of doubt that any part of that elephant has been left in the room.

Priests take on a tough job. They have to be above suspicion. If they can't be above suspicion, then they have to be fired or go to jail.

This is a Catholic town, parish by parish, neighborhood by neighborhood.

We go to Mass. We drop what we can into the collection basket. We pray for eternal salvation.

If you've got bums in the fold, don't ruin it for the rest of us, the flock.

Throw the bums out; don't move them around like puzzle pieces. Throw them the hell out.